


A Konoha Cat and an XX-ANBU

by decaf_kitty



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Prostitution, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Bottom Hatake Kakashi, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Heavy Drinking, Hurt/Comfort, Islands, M/M, Musicians, Prostitution, Public Sex, Top Umino Iruka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 06:42:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19267894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decaf_kitty/pseuds/decaf_kitty
Summary: Iruka Umino is a high-end escort working for the Konoha Cats. He handles difficult cases, important men who need intervention. He is assigned Kakashi Hatake, the lead singer and guitarist of XX-ANBU, the world's most popular pop-rock band.But Kakashi isn't just a difficult case: he may be impossible. He's become ever more detached from his band, his fans, reality. Now, on a private island, the two men meet at midnight and... well, just about anything could happen.





	A Konoha Cat and an XX-ANBU

**Author's Note:**

> It occurred to me I've never written a "rock star AU," and that I've never written a moody, surreal, nighttime story. Also, I wanted to write lovely smut and sort-of public sex, so this worked out well.
> 
> I had a few hours to spare, and this wouldn't get out of my head, so here we are.
> 
> I hope you enjoy.
> 
>  
> 
> _____

_This one is different, Iruka. He will be difficult. He may be impossible._

The dual-screen monitors showed his next client in stunning color and high definition. Unlike most men, this customer had plenty of public footage of his life to examine. 

There was the Berlin concert, where he’d given the crowd the middle finger and walked offstage midway through a hit song – and the China tour, where he’d been spotted alone on a street corner in Hongshan District, Chifeng, about 450 kilometers from his bandmates – and then, just last week, in Los Angeles, California, where he hung his legs off the side of a random apartment building for a full day, enough time that helicopters circled in the sky and crowds gathered below. Each time, he looked progressively worse, more exhausted, further detached from the people around him. Instead of seeming infuriated or overwhelmed by the shrill screaming attention of fans, he looked bored and ambivalent. It seemed like he was looking through every single person around him. 

The last image on screen was him at the final concert on their tour in San Diego: he had been singing beautifully with his glorious retro-green guitar slung over his lean shoulder, when, all of a sudden, he blinked his one uncovered eye and let go of the microphone. 

Behind him, his bandmates balked, one by one. 

Iruka recognized them all very vaguely. He wasn’t a huge fan of pop-rock music, but their images were plastered on every magazine cover at every store. Their names and life stories flooded his social media feeds. The first musician to react was Maito Gai in the far back on the drums: he abruptly looked as if he’d seen a ghost slide across the stage. He started to stand up while still clutching his drumsticks, but the bassist, Itachi Uchiha, waved him off and gave a short burst of off-mic profanity. The guitarist, Tenzo, was last to react, clearly anxiously hoping that things would come back together.

It did not.

Kakashi Hatake simply stood there for a few seconds – and then turned around and walked offstage.

“He’s at his beach house now,” the Konoha Cats manager told Iruka in their main office. She was much more worried than usual, twisting her ginger hair around her manicured finger. She had resumed her bad habit of biting her bottom lip, gorgeously painted with apple-red lipstick. They were all signs that she wasn’t bluffing: this _was_ going to be a difficult case. “We’ll fly you there tonight.”

“That’s fine,” Iruka answered out of polite impulse. He was already thinking about what to say to such a strange, conflicted man. The footage of his breakthrough performance was still playing in Iruka’s head: it was six years ago, when the band XX-ANBU was fresh and young, and Kakashi had an electric sparkle filling each of his eyes, and his fingers ran brilliant and unbridled over the guitar strings. 

That was gone now. It was dead and gone. 

During the last year, Kakashi had stopped showing both of his eyes. His red eye contact had made him famous: girls swooned over its beauty, and boys mimicked it, buying copies by the thousands. Certainly, a blood-red eye with black glitter circling the center photographed well, and it was only accentuated by the occasional appearance of similar contacts worn by the bassist, Itachi. 

But recently Kakashi had started hiding his unusual eye along with the rest of his skin. Ever since XX-ANBU first got together, he’d covered up his body, leading to millions of outlandish rumors and conspiracies. The gossip ranged from “extensive profane tattoos” to “a crazy ex-girlfriend lighting him on fire during their breakup.” There were entire magazine spreads about Kakashi’s fingerless gloves – or rather, his pretty calloused fingers and the clipped curves of his fingernails. And, of course, there were endless photographs and analytic essays discussing the upper portion of his face, and then later, the visible quarter of his face. 

He looked increasingly tired in the photographs. 

Less grounded in reality.

Less in the moment.

The last photograph of him – a fan snap from San Diego – showed Kakashi Hatake looking so utterly dead to the world that Iruka was curious if he was heading to the Caribbean to find a corpse rather than see a customer in need of intervention.

Iruka was well over clear blue water when he asked the helicopter pilot in a loud voice:

“Why now? Why so late at night?”

The mic in his ear replied with a simple, “That’s what he requested.”

Iruka was still thinking about what that meant when the helicopter settled down on the incredibly small runway and he waved a backwards goodbye to the pilot. Konoha Cats regularly dropped into odd places from the Caribbean to Siberia to South Africa: this was by no means the first time that Iruka had walked across asphalt in the darkness to a waiting well-lit house. 

However, he had to admit that it was the only time the house wasn’t a mansion or a luxury bungalow. Instead, Kakashi Hatake had made home in a simple two-bedroom one-story beach house, something so small that the palm trees nearly engulfed it outright. Only the little golden light on the front porch marked its presence on the private island. Although obviously running off a generator, the electricity in the house seemed to be off, leaving the rest of the homestead as black and silent as the sandy beach outside.

The directions had said “Don’t knock, just go inside,” and so Iruka followed orders. 

He was, as he expected, greeted by no one. There was barely room for one man, let alone any servants – a true exception to most of Iruka’s clients, who kept a coterie of help for any want and every need. The living room had been combined into a dining room with a scattered spread of instant ramen cups and frozen dinner packets across the low-lying table. The couches looked old and worn-down, as did most of the furniture throughout the house. There was really no sign of celebrity or wealth in the space, not even in the kitchen, where Iruka found the decade-old fridge door open, its internal light revealing that there wasn’t much fresh food to be had. 

Iruka too-well remembered the final line of Kakashi’s directions to Konoha Cats:

_I’ll be around somewhere._

The _somewhere_ wasn’t inside the beach house. He was instead outside on the small grey-wooden deck near an exposed hanging lightbulb, leaning against the railing with all his weight.

Kakashi Hatake was every bit as beautiful as photographs and films portrayed. 

He was long-bodied and frightfully thin. His back was to Iruka; he was staring out into the darkness at the ocean lapping at the fine white sand. The treasure of every young thing in existence, Kakashi’s silver hair was ethereal as it swept back and forth in the wind. He was wearing a skin-tight dark blue turtleneck, exposing how bewilderingly emaciated he truly was. Without much work, Iruka could count several of his ribs through the fabric. His black pants were loose by contrast, but Iruka knew he would have found them oppressively tight. 

As usual, Iruka himself was wearing a simple pair of denim jeans and a grey V-neck shirt. His hair was pulled up, his brown skin exposed in tasteful places. He wore last year’s nicest street sneakers. 

It was difficult to tell how long he’d be wearing clothes.

Then again… Kakashi had yet to acknowledge he was there. 

Instead, the world’s maddest musician brought up a half-empty handle of vodka from his side – and drank long and hard. 

All too suddenly, Iruka realized that the turtleneck was down: Kakashi’s mysterious face was partially visible. Unable to stop himself, he dropped his gaze down to the wooden deck, staring wide-eyed at the peeling grey paint by his white sneakers. He was surprised by the lump in his throat. He hadn’t thought he had a celebrity crush on Kakashi Hatake, but… but the very little he had just seen of the man’s face…

Well, it was pretty.

Kakashi Hatake was pretty.

He was also drunk, very drunk. The silver-haired musician did things two things at once: he tossed the bottle into the sand bank by the house and jerked up his turtleneck up to hide his face. He swayed on his feet as he turned around and put his back to the wooden railing. His trademark blue headband was in place, but it was an unusual variant on the ones from public footage. Instead of stitched embroidery or a high-tech metal panel, there was a void in the cloth… It was all endless blue, dark and smooth, covering a long strip of his face, including his left eye.

His single exposed eye stuck on Iruka. For a deeply intoxicated man, Kakashi had unnerving accuracy in pinpointing not only his new guest – but also Iruka’s facial scar. Standing underneath the unprotected lightbulb on the back porch, Iruka was overexposed, his features bared. He could tell Kakashi’s attention was solely on his scar, the one that slipped across his cheeks in both directions, buried down the bridge of his nose. He’d worn the scar most of his life; he barely remembered a day passing without someone giving him – _no, it_ – a second glance.

Iruka knew Kakashi had a scar on his face as well. 

Because the man was the dreamy icon of XX-ANBU, his silver hair, his red sparkling eye, and his slight scar were all so famous, so well known, that it was laughable to _not_ remember the sight of it, even if now Kakashi hid it with a headband.

There were a million rumors about the scar, too. Knife fights, self-harm, a horrific accident in a foreign country.

Iruka had never covered his own scar. He really couldn’t, it being in the center of his face. But he didn’t want to try, and he never had. The old injury didn’t bother him, although sometimes, on some days, it itched, and he scratched at the skin underneath it unthinkingly. 

He had a hand up to do that just now, he suddenly realized.

Kakashi was watching him move with a steady single-eyed gaze. In contrast, the musician’s body was unsteady, his shoulders shifting, his legs barely holding him up. His blue mask stayed in place, his headband covering the rest of his face. His expression was hidden behind so many layers…

It was Iruka’s job to strip all that way to see what was going on, however he could.

Time to get started.

So… he said quietly:

“Hello.”

Kakashi’s revealed silver eyebrow rose up his pale forehead. His lips twisted under his mask, he tilted his head slightly to the right. He was considering Iruka, that was obvious. But the musician was so drunk, there was no telling what his next move might be. It wasn’t as if Iruka hadn’t slept with men out of their minds: he couldn’t count the number of politicians and artists that he’d laid underneath while they struggled to get it up. He assumed it would be much the same with this peculiar person, this Kakashi Hatake, for all his protective covering and self-defensive garb. Just like the others… he’d have Iruka down on the floor, shoved over the kitchen counter, pressed against a balcony railing, and then he’d sigh, bitch, moan about ‘how this never happens to him’ and ‘just wait a second’ and ‘why don’t you suck it? that will definitely help.’

Maybe Kakashi would make him close his eyes? Or blindfold him? Maybe they’d only do it from behind? What if Kakashi made him get on all fours in the sand, keep him outside in the darkness? Would Iruka even see any more skin than a fan would at a concert?

Or… or maybe Kakashi would ditch all his clothes straightaway, get on top of Iruka, and choke the life out of him?

Iruka had that happen before. He could tell the difference between breathplay and attempted murder; he’d once ended up knocking the U.S. senator unconscious rather than die in a hotel bedroom. He wasn’t opposed to the stranger, more violent kinks… but no way was he going to get murdered on the job. For all its good, Konoha Cats wasn’t worth his life. 

Kakashi was still staring at him, slowly settling against the railing. He hadn’t answered the ‘hello’ – but he hadn’t changed in any other discernable way, either. He looked bleary-eyed even in the darkness, not just drunk, but the dead distant manner from recent fan photos. 

Finally, the musician shrugged both shoulders, just a tiny bit, and then he turned towards the beach, lazily waving over his shoulder for Iruka to follow him.

Suddenly, the pair was walking down the shore, right where the dark ocean water crashed against the white sand. As they strolled far more leisurely than Iruka would have expected, he eventually had to give up his shoes, taking precious time to remove his socks and tuck them inside his sneakers. He was surprised when he saw that Kakashi was waiting for him, looking back at him, considering him as he took care of his secretly prized possession. 

The man was downright gorgeous in the moonlight with the vast black ocean behind him. His silver hair was nearly moonshine on its own, and his too-white skin practically glowed. His form, so dangerously lean, so unaffected and indifferent, was strangely attractive in the darkness.

Iruka was more accustomed to frenetic men grabbing him, large cruel hands going for his ass, porcelain teeth biting his lips, hairy muscular legs shoving his thighs open. 

Instead… Kakashi was surreally calm as he watched Iruka catch up with him.

Well… Iruka had also been with enough drugged-out men to know what it was like to try and sleep with a barely conscious partner. He’d showed up to find Parliament members sedated on illegal opiates, he’d repeatedly used Narcan on Governors and Cabinet Secretaries. He could tell from experience that XX-ANBU’s lead singer wasn’t on anything dulling his senses – nothing more than the vodka he’d been drinking on the back-porch. He was still unstable as he stood in the sand, working to keep his footing. His feet were bare and pale-skinned. 

But Kakashi was alert. He was thinking. He was contemplating Iruka.

After a moment, they resumed walking on the shoreline in silence.

Although there didn’t seem to be much space in his pockets, Kakashi had managed to squeeze both of his gloved hands out of sight. He walked a bit erratically from the booze billowing through his system, but he seemed as indifferent and composed as he did on recent film. He was so thoroughly unworried about Iruka being beside him, there were moments that Iruka wondered if Kakashi remembered that he wasn’t alone, that someone was with him in the darkness.

Iruka orchestrated things so he was the one closest to the water coming ashore. He had a small but sincere fear that the drunken musician might swerve right and dive into the water and drown before Iruka could save him. He’d only had to stop one other client from drowning, and it had made him jittery for weeks: he wasn’t prepared to watch someone as glorious-looking at Kakashi Hatake disappear under pitch-black waves.

It seemed appropriate, anyway, because, this way, Iruka stayed in the sightline of Kakashi’s one open eye. He could tell the other man was sporadically glancing his way, sometimes slowly, other times more rapid-fire. But the musician seemed utterly fine with what they were doing; he kept their pace constant, his stride unchanging even while unstable. 

At some point, Iruka casually looked over to his client and found that Kakashi had removed his headband, tucking it into the back pocket of his jeans.

From this angle, Iruka couldn’t see the infamous scar – or if the mad musician was currently wearing his famous contact lens – but he felt himself blushing in surprise… 

So he would get to see Kakashi’s face, if just a little bit.

For a while, Iruka chose to stare down at their bare feet as they walked the beach hours past midnight. He found few shells decorated the sand on this island. Over and over again, crystal-clear dark water danced to the shore then slipped away into the blackness of the night. It was unexpectedly cold: the ocean wind was merciless as it crashed into land. As he rubbed his exposed forearms, Iruka spared a glance at Kakashi, wondering if the other man was cold, too.

… He wasn’t wearing his mask. 

Kakashi had pulled down his turtleneck. Entirely. Silently.

He was still walking at the same speed and stride. His dual-eyed gaze was far ahead of him. But… and Iruka couldn’t help but be mystified and taken at the same time… Kakashi Hatake had his whole face exposed to the cold nighttime air. He was so very pale, more so than the upper portion of his face: he almost glowed in the moonlight. He looked like a curious demi-god come down to visit mortals, innocent in his ways and detached in his mannerisms, unaware of his overwhelming beauty amongst the marred faces of men. 

Kakashi’s dark eye slanted over to Iruka’s face.

And then things moved fast, very fast. 

Suddenly, Iruka was flung away from the water down onto the sand. He was wholly baffled at Kakashi’s strength - he would have never guessed in a million years that the starved musician had enough muscle to bodily throw him. Before he could even think to prop himself up, Kakashi was flush against him, his entire long emaciated body settled against Iruka’s muscular frame. The other man pressed his shins down on Iruka’s, had their hips perfectly aligned, shoved his gloved hands deep in the white sand on either side of Iruka’s surprised scarred face. 

Kakashi’s breath was vodka and fresh mint as he leaned closer to Iruka, forcing them both further into the crazy white sand.

There was nothing else to do but witness Kakashi Hatake, XX-ANBU lead singer and guitarist, multi-talented mad genius, world’s most enigmatic dreamboat at his worst searing intensity.

His face was so unbelievably pretty, it actually hurt Iruka to look up at him.

The scar was tragedy incarnate, but Iruka loved it immediately seeing it with the rest of Kakashi’s face. His skin was achingly pale, even more so on the lower half of his cheeks and jawline, where it bordered on being sickly white. By his pink lips was a dangerously intriguing black beauty mark, something that screamed sex and long-held secrets. 

Both of his eyes were black as they bore down on Iruka. His silver brows matched his delicate grey eyelashes, each individual and fragile as they framed his dark searching pupils. The man was so disturbingly pretty that it had Iruka feeling faint, his ears filled with the sounds of crashing ocean water, his skin turned cold against the freezing sand. 

He was absolutely breathless underneath Kakashi Hatake.

Ever so slowly, yet wobblier and weaker than ever could be imagined, Kakashi lowered his face closer to Iruka’s until they were almost kissing. His somber dark eyes never strayed from Iruka’s astonished, aroused gaze. 

Then he said in a voice so desperate it had blood flooding Iruka’s cheeks and groin all at once:

“I’m so empty inside…” Kakashi’s eyes went weak, wanting… and then he breathily begged, “Fill me up.”

Iruka’s right hand was out of the sand and threaded through those famous silver locks less than a second later. He pulled down Kakashi the extra inch that had them immediately kissing madly. His tongue plunged into the musician’s mouth as if he could reach the man’s songs that way. His other hand forced up Kakashi’s snug turtleneck, and he was physically counting those pronounced ribs, each of them, before gripping the man’s waist and rutting up against him. 

For all his silence earlier in the night, Kakashi now came alive above Iruka.

He was at first soft and surprised in his sounds, but soon he was making darker, wanton moans and even whimpers, all of which drove Iruka into such a desperate state, he was having a hard time keeping track of reality. The setting was surreal: he could hear the ocean, relentless in her rhythms, crashing over and over again against the island. The darkness around them swallowed their passion whole, made it all the wilder and more frantic somehow. While he couldn’t tell when or how it had happened, Iruka realized he’d unbuttoned and unzipped Kakashi’s skin-tight jeans, forcing them down as far as he could while still kissing the other man. The musician wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and Iruka was so thrilled by the discovery that he moved his mouth away from Kakashi’s and crushed his lips into the man’s silver hair, murmuring heatedly, “God, yes, that’s perfect, thank you.”

Kakashi answered him with an uncontrolled whine into Iruka’s shoulder.

Damn if Iruka wasn’t suddenly moving even quicker with that sound echoing in his ears. He kicked the rest of Kakashi’s jeans off and shimmied his own down with much more ease, pausing only to get own the lubricant from his pocket and a condom. As he started to reach down towards the space between Kakashi’s thighs, the other man must have noticed the newly emerged items, because, abruptly, Iruka found he was holding only the small bottle of lube.

He looked up in surprise to see silver-haired, fascinatingly scarred, pale-faced Kakashi shifting backwards – and then _flinging_ the condom into the darkness behind them.

Kakashi’s voice was so much darker and harder as he repeated, staring down at Iruka:

“I said fill me up. I meant it.”

Iruka responded with all the elegance he could muster, which was none at all:

“O-of course.”

He was a bit off his game after such a serious order, but Kakashi carelessly took the lube from his hand and spread the stuff over his fingers, leaning forward and reaching backward in the same motion. The man’s lips – and his beauty mark – pressed against the slope of Iruka’s shoulder and throat, and he was soon making painfully sweet huffs into Iruka’s skin as he opened himself up with obvious practiced skill. The effect was dizzying on Iruka’s already impassioned body: he turned his head slightly and licked the length of Kakashi’s ear and then _bit down_ when the other man made a truly exquisite sound of self-pleasure. Iruka’s hands acted of their own accord by holding Kakashi’s bared waist, the man’s turtleneck shoved upward but still clinging to his chest. He was mindlessly touching the sharp lines of Kakashi’s ribs when –

The musician lifted upwards and kissed the very end of Iruka’s facial scar.

He whispered only two words as their eyes met in the cold darkness:

“Fuck. Me.”

Somehow Iruka’s animal brain took over, and he was suddenly on top of the other man, pressing him down into the sand and drawing up his too-pale legs. He instinctively tested out Kakashi’s earlier motions and found him soft… so soft it made Iruka feel dumb and dangerous. It seemed very likely, incredibly likely, that the drunken musician had already serviced himself earlier in the night based on how ready he was… and Iruka’s head spun, dizzy and hot, at the very idea of such a beautiful man taking his pleasure into his own hands.

Underneath him, Kakashi unpredictably became aggressive again. 

He grabbed Iruka’s forearms with insane strength and gave him a truly foreboding stare, one that declared in no uncertain terms that fucking needed to commence – now.

And so Iruka was not exactly thinking coherently when he first thrust into the other man.

He certainly lost his line of thought when Kakashi flung back his head in the sand, silver hair fluttering against the white grain, and moaned deep in his throat, keeping his lips tightly closed.

Iruka could be gentle, he could be rough: he was rarely asked to top his clients, but he was versatile, and he received enough that he knew the best tricks. He always took extreme care with his partners. He looked for hints and clues with his lover to see what they liked, to see what they needed, to see what they found uncomfortable. But with Kakashi… he just wanted to produce sound, he wanted to make the man whimper, he wanted to cause those dark moans to swim across the shadow-black beach. He immediately found the right pace for Kakashi Hatake: it was faster than he would have expected, but it allowed for shallow thrusts and the occasional punctuated deeper motion that sent Kakashi clawing the sand and choking off moans. 

Normally, Iruka would slow down, draw his hands over his lover, tease them, let them enjoy the experience. Yet, tonight, in the deep of night on a distant island, he was eager, enthused, _hungry_ to see Kakashi come, and so he was gripping the man’s waist and his hips. He was digging in his fingernails into that pale flesh as hard as he could so he could keep his hold. 

Spread out underneath him, Kakashi was swiftly focused on his own satisfaction. He spared a gloved hand so he could stroke his erect cock, leaving the other in the sand to clutch hopelessly at the shore. His eyes stayed closed the entirety of their sexual encounter; he never looked up to catch Iruka’s gaze in the darkness. His pink lips slowly parted as the minutes passed. A divinely lovely blush soon saturated his bare cheeks, making his scar tissue stand out and leading Iruka to stare at the black beauty mark by his mouth. 

Suddenly, Kakashi lifted his back off the sand, and his free hand roughly grabbed the side of Iruka’s scarred face. The subsequent kiss was explosive, despairing, wild: Iruka couldn’t keep up his pace, and he opened his mouth in an unrepressed groan at the merged pleasure of such a passionate kiss with fucking another man. He followed Kakashi back down to the shore, and they were kissing, tongues wet and touching, when the musician stiffened all over and –

His dark eyes opened and sought Iruka’s so very desperately.

Then they closed again as Kakashi came with a deliberately stifled moan.

It was enough that Iruka didn’t have to force himself to come – he was there already, and he moved one hand upward to Kakashi’s clothed shoulder to hold him hard down into the sand. He could tell he was reddening Kakashi’s exposed waist near the man’s right hip from the force of his grip, but Iruka’s brain was white wicked pleasure and high satisfied surprise. He felt his body give everything it could to Kakashi, and he blushed at the very thought of it, more than his arousal from their sex, but – but it was what the other man wanted – and –

He shakily glanced down at Kakashi… and found the man looking right back up at him.

Ever so carefully, Kakashi brought up the gloved hand that had been clutching sand then Iruka’s scarred cheek – and he pushed lightly on Iruka’s clothed chest to move him away.

The mild shove was more than enough to get Iruka moving. He was immediately on his feet, jerking up his jeans and feeling more abashed than he’d ever been. Out of instinct, he looked away from the musician, remembering in a strangely delayed fashion that the other man was currently soused out of his mind on hard liquor. Certainly Kakashi now appeared inebriated: he was clumsy as he pulled off his turtleneck, rid himself of his gloves, and tugged ineffectively at the pants-leg before finally shaking it off like he was furiously sick of the garment’s love of him.

All of a sudden, the man was entirely naked, sitting on the white sand of the Caribbean island. 

But not for long – because Kakashi stood up and strode past Iruka – right into the ocean.

Iruka heard himself gasp out loud. He blushed at that, too, wondering at how his client had made him an idiot so fast. Yet, unlike other times, when he might watch a customer take care of themselves in a temperature-regulated pool or a luxury canopy shower, Iruka was taking off his clothes in a concerned rush and following Kakashi into the cold clear water. He was noisier than the other man had been when Kakashi had glided from ankle-deep to waist-high waters. 

Nonetheless, Kakashi didn’t look back at him. 

It left Iruka to stare at the frighteningly appealing body of XX-ANBU’s front man.

Hidden underneath hand-selected clothing fit to his form, Kakashi Hatake was sick. He either had an eating disorder or a substance abuse problem or perhaps both. He was wasting away. Without a doubt, Iruka had felt the man’s suffering as they fucked: Kakashi was impossibly thin, his ribs showing, his hipbones jutting. He was probably surviving on liquor, pills, and willpower, as some musicians did in their dwindling days. So much of his younger self was there, hanging spectrally about him, like a past vision wispily floating about him. There was the truly beautiful silver hair that Kakashi now dipped under ocean water, getting it soaking wet, running his bare fingers through and keeping it off his forehead. There was the pale expanse of skin that girls and boys loved and lusted after, the half of his face, the quarter of his face, except now the color was everywhere, a gorgeous white that did truthfully start to look unhealthy in places. 

And… as Kakashi turned to glance at Iruka…

There were those same dark eyes, the ones that went bright under stagelights, the ones that caught lightning storms of excited creativity and cascaded magic across the world. 

Oh, Kakashi Hatake _was_ alive. He was still alive under the dead, the death.

Iruka was not graceful at all as he waded through the water, but he didn’t care. He saw Kakashi watching his approach, and he didn’t mind that, either. Instead, he wanted the man to stand still, to wait for him, to accept his help – and – and –

The moment that they kissed again, this time not during feverish sex strewn about in the sand, he could tell he would need to put in leave at work, because this… this wasn’t work anymore. 

This was what he wanted to do with his life.

He wanted to support this man - this strange, conflicted man. 

Kakashi was looking directly at him as they pulled apart, unconcerned about his exposed scar and his revealed face, typically perpetually protected along with the rest of his body. His dark eyes were soft and struggling. His voice was quiet as he said slowly, unsteadily, “Could you stay with me for a while?” Even as he embraced Iruka full body and nestled into his neck, Kakashi sounded preemptively hurt, he sounded small and distracted, “I like you. I like your scar; I like that you don’t stare. I don’t want to die. I want to sing again.”

The ocean was cold, and so were the lives of famous men. Iruka knew both truths too well. 

He murmured, “Yes, of course,” as he tried his best to hold up the other man.


End file.
